knowing that john has to leave, and the center for american progress has come up with ideas, and, john, maybe you would like to weigh in on some of those and your thoughts on this debate. >> peter, following up on this morning's session, in order to get a balanced approach, we need but revenue and spending restraint. we need to ideas that you talked about this morning with respect to restraint, particularly in the entitlements and medicare specifically, but we also need new revenue. but we also need new revenue. we spent about the last year trying to think through how to get right new revenue, and we had of ideas from both sides, but we put together a group of people who bore quite experienced, bob rubin, larry summers, well-known names, and we tried to work through hell to see if you could raise enough revenue to actually hit the simpson-bowles target. we limited unjustified tax loopholes, but we primarily did it by converting the current system of deductions which favor high income taxpayers which equalizes the benefits of middle-income and high-income taxpayers get. we restored the